Life

Standing in Barnes & Noble (“Will you be saving ten percent with our discount card today?” trills the girl at the till over and over) at the corner of 3rd Street and Wilshire in Santa Monica, reading through the new Michael Palin diaries. I’m struck by how often something depresses him, and how ...

Is it better to be able to see a long way down the road a bus will be coming from, since that means you’ll get to see it soonest, even though you might have a long wait for it to subsequently actually arrive once you’ve seen it, and even though if you can’t see the ...

After years of bristling with annoyance at any suggestion that my very vaguely Anglican upbringing might be much of an influence on what I do or don’t believe — one flavour of which might be to imply atheism as a negative reaction to something imposed, rather than a ground-up positivist construction of something new ...

My answers to a sequence of questions from a friend, asked as part of personal research, and posted here with a big FWIW disclaimer. Her intro: Explanation: In this paper, I’m looking at sexuality as identity – specifically in the BDSM and spanking communities. Identity is different than action: a man who had ...

Considering how relatively few — relative to a truly committed fan (my excuse being that I’m a Middlesbrough fan) — football matches I’ve been to in my time, an oddly large number of them have had a significance beyond their immediate competitive stake. I was at the game at Wembley on a chilly night (though ...

As you drive north on the 110 through downtown LA, a spectacular photo-realistic mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (by Kent Twitchell) looks benignly down from the multi-storey side of a very-LA concrete parking structure. It’s every bit as striking and fresh as it was the first time I came to LA. The ...

Why didn’t I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I’d had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he’s a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as ...

Evidence that I’ve been thinking too much about web-design lately: I was looking at a very elegant multi-column university letterhead yesterday, and I thought to myself: “Oh sure, it looks good now, but how will it cope when someone resizes the paper?” Funny that a window has become my default, rather than ...

Maybe I’ve been wrapped in the deadening clutches of US bureaucracy too much lately — yesterday at a branch office of the INS/CIS, fetchingly situated in the end unit of an unlovely strip-mall — but it occurred to me yesterday as I sat with the other hopeful souls that, while the essence of a country ...

Maybe it’s been done already, but someone ought to write something Kafka-esque in which a Josef Q finds himself compelled to join queue after queue in an impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy, the end of each interminable one leading to the beginning of the next, only to find, at the moment of apparent conclusion, ...